<?php
/**
 * <https://y.st./>
 * Copyright © 2019 Alex Yst <mailto:copyright@y.st>
 * 
 * This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
 * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 * the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
 * (at your option) any later version.
 * 
 * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
 * GNU General Public License for more details.
 * 
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 * along with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org./licenses/>.
**/

$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'A lovely update-availability notification model',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2019/08/07.jpg" alt="An outdoor dining area at night" class="framed-centred-image" width="800" height="480"/>
<section id="diet">
	<h2>Dietary intake</h2>
	<p>
		For breakfast, I had 94 grams of cereal and 136 grams of soy milk.
		For lunch, I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
		For dinner, I had a veggie patty and tapioca cheese sandwich.
	</p>
	<p>
		I didn&apos;t feel comfortable getting certain types of snacks with such an imprecise scale.
		With a better scale now, and having finished those dried cherries, I got pretzels and the ingredients for smoothies.
		With how long it&apos;s been since I&apos;ve had these things though, I sort of went overboard.
		I had 561 grams of smoothie and 64 grams of pretzels.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="laser">
	<h2>They never sent the $a[laser]!</h2>
	<p>
		I was planning to wait until the package was a week overdue before actually taking any action, but I was getting prepared to file a report with Discover to have the charge reversed because the vendor was refusing to give me any information, had locked me out of my account, and the $a[laser] they supposedly sent had never arrived.
		When they day came that the package was a week overdue, I wanted to be able to file the charge reverse claim immediately.
		As part of that, I was reading through my email to make sure I had the arrival date correct, unlike the battery that I&apos;d thought was coming a month earlier until I went to mark it on my calendar.
		Sure enough, I had the date correct.
		However, there was also a note in the email that said they&apos;d notify me when they shipped the $a[laser].
		They never notified me.
		They never sent it!
		So I checked my Discover account history.
		They&apos;d never billed me!
		They sent me a confirmation email, but then cancelled my order on me <strong>*without even telling me*</strong>!
		I have been waiting <strong>*three weeks*</strong> for a package they told me they&apos;d send, but that they never did.
		They&apos;ve wasted three weeks of my time!
		I am royally ticked off.
	</p>
	<p>
		I went looking for another site that&apos;d actually send me a $a[laser].
		Surprisingly, there seem to be very few sites that even carry them.
		However, the ones that <strong>*do*</strong> carry them are declining both main my credit cards, a Discover and a Visa.
		There&apos;s no reason why both accounts would be acting up on me, so it&apos;s the vendors doing something hokey.
		I even checked in with Discover though, and they&apos;re not even seeing attempts to charge on their end.
		The Discover account therefore isn&apos;t being a problem, the vendors are just blocking that one without reason, though I suppose there&apos;s an off chance that they&apos;re actually trying to accept the Visa card and that account&apos;s being problematic.
		Doubtful though, and it&apos;s a low enough chance that it&apos;s not worth looking into after having already verified that one of the card accounts is just fine.
	</p>
	<p>
		I managed to find one site, and only one site, that would sell to me.
		They have exactly one $a[laser] for sale.
		There are no choices.
		Furthermore, it&apos;s such a no-name $a[laser] that I can&apos;t find a single review for it.
		I have no way to know how well this $a[laser] works, or if it even works at all.
		Joy.
		Needless to say, I kept searching after finding this one, but eventually gave up bought it.
		They sent a confirmation email, but more importantly, I got a charge alert from the bank about the Visa card getting charged.
		(This site doesn&apos;t take Discover.)
		They&apos;ve actually taken the money.
		It&apos;s still possible for them to reverse the charge, but if all goes well, they&apos;ll instead send the $a[laser] like they should.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="Cyrus">
	<h2>Visit from Cyrus</h2>
	<p>
		Cyrus came over for a visit today.
		We talked for about three and a half hours about everything and nothing.
		It was a very pleasant break form all the stress going on in my life right now.
		It seems he&apos;s moved back to town, having transferred his credits to finish up school here.
		Afterwords, he&apos;s going to pursue a doctorate!
		I&apos;d love to be a doctor myself, but I don&apos;t know what I&apos;d want to study long enough to make that happen.
		Furthermore, I can&apos;t really afford a school that offers that high of education.
	</p>
	<p>
		But anyway, he&apos;s looking for a local job, and hopefully we&apos;ll see more of each other now that we&apos;re within biking distance of one another.
		I do need to figure out where he&apos;s staying though.
		My guess is that he&apos;s staying with our father.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion posts for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			I think you phased that very well.
			Like you said, people get accustomed to doing things a certain way, and are unwilling to change without good reason.
			You were able to say that without any sign of cynicism, which is something I wasn&apos;t able to do.
			To an extent, this sort of thing makes sense, but people take it way too far and it gets on my nerves to think about.
		</p>
		<p>
			I like your example of an eyedropper tool for photographs, too.
			To make it useful on a mobile, it could be used to set a wallpaper colour or something.
			It&apos;s certainly not something that could be captured well using text inputs and selection boxes though.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Slider bars are an interesting idea for an application control.
			I hadn&apos;t thought of those.
			They&apos;d be useful for many sorts of application with a continuous range of values a user might enter though.
			Great idea!
		</p>
		<p>
			Your list of default controls though is for Java.
			I suppose many of those can be used in Android too, probably, but it&apos;s also going to work better if you use the Android-specific controls that are designed for use with a touchscreen.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			That decomposability is an interesting property.
			You mentioned that it means that Bézier curves can be drawn iteratively.
			You can draw half of half of half of one (an eighth of one) if it&apos;s too hard to draw the whole thing at once, for example.
			There&apos;s more to it than just that though.
			You could set up a simple Bézier curve that approximates what you&apos;re after, then split it into multiple curves and fine-tune them separately for a better result.
			I can&apos;t help but feel that might be helpful when trying to draw complex shapes.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<p>
		I checked in on the forum to see if anything was going on with the broken $a[API] on the forum.
		I found that one student responded to me yesterday, providing an alternative solution to my own.
		It was about as messy as mine though, if not messier.
		My solution involved using alternative features of the $a[API]; ones that hadn&apos;t broken yet.
		Their solution was to copy the entire $a[API]&apos;s script into their own script and remove a particular line from it that had stopped working.
		It&apos;s awesome that they were able to track down which line of the $a[API] was causing the problem, which due to a lack of meaningful error messages, was something I wasn&apos;t able to do myself.
		Copying the whole script into their own code though ... I liked my solution better.
		A third student started another topic about the issue though today.
		Who even knows why they didn&apos;t use the same topic as the other two of us.
		They found the real problem.
		Apparently, the <code>three.js</code> scripts are prone to breaking when the main <code>three.js</code> repo is updated.
		The way they put it is that you know there&apos;s an update when something or everything suddenly breaks on you.
		Joy.
		What a lovely way to notify users to update their scripts, no?
		But anyway, they posted links to the updated scripts, which restores the proper functionality of the entire $a[API].
		The catch is that they posted it today, which is <strong>*the day our scripts are due*</strong>.
		I don&apos;t have time to go back and learn how to use the proper functionality we were originally supposed to use in one day.
		All the while though, it seems the professor was replying to all three of us thanking us for reporting on our dificulties, but not actually providing any solutions.
		Honestly, I don&apos;t think this professor really has much by way of reading comprehension skills, and probably didn&apos;t understand that there is an actual technical issue, and that this isn&apos;t just three students having problems trying to figure out the work.
		I mean, every week, I write in my learning journal that I&apos;m not able to learn much due to the word limit that&apos;s been imposed on me, and two weeks later, they always respond that they&apos;re glad I&apos;m learning so much.
		Clearly, they&apos;re not understanding what I&apos;m writing.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="Minetest">
	<h2>Minetest</h2>
	<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_3.0/minetest.net./weblog/2019/08/07.png" alt="Rail crossing" class="framed-centred-image" width="1024" height="600"/>
	<p>
		I dug up a bit more mese, set up the rails in the tunnel, and finished the tunnel walls.
		There&apos;s an odd - I guess you&apos;d call it a natural tunnel - on World&apos;s Navel.
		It&apos;s perpendicular to my path, and much wider and taller.
		My tunnel runs into it and stops, but I still need to build a second tunnel on the other side and a bridge to cross the gap.
		So I still have more tunnelling to do here, but it&apos;s mostly done.
		I&apos;d also like to extend all three new path ends out over the ocean just slightly before I put on the end caps and the signs saying the roads are closed before I move on anywhere.
	</p>
	<p>
		I guess with all that done, I&apos;ll probably go north.
		I&apos;ve been debating about which way to go, and there&apos;s no jungle nearby in any direction, given the cold climate.
		I&apos;ll have to go pretty far out, and I have no way to know which direction will lead me to a jungle quickest.
		To the north though, I know that there&apos;s a glacier, having been there in some of my test worlds.
		It&apos;s not the one I mined the first time I started a world recently, before I got more organised in how I&apos;m playing, but it&apos;s a glacier one the less.
		It&apos;ll be nice to have the ice from there as another building material.
	</p>
</section>
END
);
